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phpstringsubstringtrimtruncate

Get first N words of a string

How do I only get the first 10 words from a string?

Solution 
  • implode(' ', array_slice(explode(' ', $sentence), 0, 10));

    To add support for other word breaks like commas and dashes, preg_match gives a quick way and doesn't require splitting the string:

    function get_words($sentence, $count = 10) {
  preg_match("/(?:\w+(?:\W+|$)){0,$count}/", $sentence, $matches);
  return $matches[0];
}

    As Pebbl mentions, PHP doesn't handle UTF-8 or Unicode all that well, so if that is a concern then you can replace \w for [^\s,\.;\?\!] and \W for [\s,\.;\?\!].